ys, "is to correct vice, and laugh at folly ... This
piece is in support of virtue, morality, decency, and the Laws of the
Land: it satirizes both public and private venality, and reprobates
inordinate passions and tyrannical conduct in a parent ... Now, with
regard to my comedy is it not just and salutary that the subtilty [_sic_],
pride, insolence, cunning, and the thorough-paced villany [_sic_] of a
backbiting Scotchman should be ridiculed? What a wretched state the Comic
Muse and the Stage would be reduced to, were the prohibition of laughing
at the corruption and other vices of the age to prevail!"[3] True the
Comic
Muse, long sick, as Garrick said in his prologue to _She Stoops to
Conquer_, had almost died, though farces had done something to sustain
her. Fielding's and Garrick's little satires had largely avoided
sentiment; and the personal, often gross farces of Foote had continued to
use ridicule. But even these lack the forceful pertinacity of Macklin's
denunciation of hypocrisy and vice. It is perhaps too bad that he fell so
far into caricature in the portraits of Lord Lumbercourt and his daughter,
that the main love stories do smack of sensibility, and that he turned his
hero into a mouthpiece for the opposition to the Tory ministries of the
early years of George III. And it is perhaps true that all the characters,
including Sir Pertinax, are more true to the theatre than to the actual
life of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Still, Sir Pertinax is
vigorous, and the author's position is unmistakable.

The earliest portion of _The Man of the World_ in the Larpent Collection
is a passage in the fourth act of _The School for Husbands_, performed at
Covent Garden as _The Married Libertine_ on 28 January 1761, twenty years
before _The Man of the World_ was finally presented in London. Elsewhere I
have compared the three complete versions submitted to the Examiner and
have shown why the Lord Chamberlain could not permit it to be licensed.[4]

_The Man of the World_ was first published in England, with Macklin's
farce _Love a la Mode_, by subscription, in a handsome quarto. Facing the
title-page is a portrait of the author, "in his 93.^d Year," engraved by
John Conde after Opie, for which the trustees of the fund paid 25 guineas.
Preceding the text of the play are the list of subscribers, which contains
many eminent names, an "Advertisement from the Editor," explaining the
occasion and method of publicat